Fact #102558
When:
Short story:
Blues harmonica player Jeff Carp, who worked with Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Paul Butterfield and others, drowns aged just 18 off Panama, in the Caribbean.
Full article:
Norman Dayron (record producer) : Jeff was only eighteen years old. He was originally from Brooklyn, but he was a student at the University Of Chicago. He had a band called The 43rd Street Snipers, a horn band, all of them teenagers, and he could do things on the chromatic harmonica that were very sophisticated, things that even Paul Butterfield couldn't do.
Jeff was also a good singer and had a great future ahead of him. We auditioned that band for Capitol Records and signed them to a large contract. So he was one of the second generation of young whites who were frequenting the black clubs, sitting in with people.
I used to take him and his band into Chess studios at night when the studios were not being used and recorded an album's worth of material with him. Then I had him do a private performance for the president of Capitol, and they immediately signed him.
Unfortunately, after the Howlin' Wolf London Sessions (which Carp played on) were over, he was so happy, he wanted to celebrate. He fell in love with an older woman, an English woman named Scarlet Gray, who was a licensed ship's captain and navigator, and she proposed they go down to the Caribbean and hitch-hike together.
One day, they were on a boat where the ship's captain went insane. He had taken an animal tranquilizer, PCP, and was threatening to kill people on the ship with a big butcher knife. He was chasing them around in a psychotic rage. So some people, including Jeff, jumped overboard. Being a New York City kid, he had never learned to swim, and he drowned in ten feet of water by the dock where the boat was moored.
So the album never came out, and there went one of the greatest harmonica players who ever lived, at the age of eighteen.
(Source : interview by Johnny Black for Blues magazine, 2013)
Tweet this Fact
Jeff was also a good singer and had a great future ahead of him. We auditioned that band for Capitol Records and signed them to a large contract. So he was one of the second generation of young whites who were frequenting the black clubs, sitting in with people.
I used to take him and his band into Chess studios at night when the studios were not being used and recorded an album's worth of material with him. Then I had him do a private performance for the president of Capitol, and they immediately signed him.
Unfortunately, after the Howlin' Wolf London Sessions (which Carp played on) were over, he was so happy, he wanted to celebrate. He fell in love with an older woman, an English woman named Scarlet Gray, who was a licensed ship's captain and navigator, and she proposed they go down to the Caribbean and hitch-hike together.
One day, they were on a boat where the ship's captain went insane. He had taken an animal tranquilizer, PCP, and was threatening to kill people on the ship with a big butcher knife. He was chasing them around in a psychotic rage. So some people, including Jeff, jumped overboard. Being a New York City kid, he had never learned to swim, and he drowned in ten feet of water by the dock where the boat was moored.
So the album never came out, and there went one of the greatest harmonica players who ever lived, at the age of eighteen.
(Source : interview by Johnny Black for Blues magazine, 2013)